Truth

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Truth (French:vérité) is one of the most central, and yet most complex terms in Lacan's discourse.

Truth and Psychoanalytic Treatment

The aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to lead the analysand to articulate the truth of his or her desire.

Truth does not await, in some preformed state of fullness, to be revealed to the analysand by the analyst, but is rather constructed in the dialectical movement of the treatment itself.[1]

Truth and Philosophy

Lacan argues, in opposition to the traditions of classical philosophy, that truth is not beautiful[2] and that it is not necessarily beneficial to learn the truth.[3]

Lacan speaks about 'truth' in the singular, not as a single universal truth, but as particular truth, unique to each subject.[4]

Truth and Language

Truth is only a meaningful concept in the context of language: "It is with the appearance of language that the dimension of truth emerges."[5]

Psychoanalytic treatment is based on the fundamental premise that speech is the only means of revealing the truth about desire.

"Truth hollows its way into the real thanks to the dimension of speech. There is neither true nor false prior to speech."[6]


Truth and Science

From Lacan's earliest writings, the term 'truth' has metaphysical, even mystical, nuances which problematise any attempt to articulate truth and science.

It is not that Lacan denies that science aims to know the truth, but simply that science cannot claim to monopolise truth as its exclusive property.[7]

Lacan later argues that science is in fact based on a foreclosure of the concept of truth as cause.[8]

The concept of truth is essential for understanding madness, and modern science renders madness meaningless by ignoring the concept of truth.[9]

Truth and Deception

Truth is intimately connected with deception, since lies can often reveal the truth about desire more eloquently than honest statements.

Deception and lies are not the opposite of truth: on the contrary, they are inscribed in the text of truth.

The analyst's role is to reveal the truth inscribed in the deception of the analysand's speech.

Although the analysand may in effect be saying to the analyst "I am deceiving you," the analyst says to the analysand "In this I am deceiving to you, what you are sending as message is what I express to you, and in doing so you are telling the truth.[10]

Truth versus false appearances

The false appearances presented by the analysand are not merely obstacles that the analyst must expose and discard in order to discover the truth; on the contrary, the analyst must take them into account (see semblance).

Truth, error and mistakes

Psychoanalysis has shown that the truth about desire is often revealed by mistakes (parapraxes).

The complex relations between truth, mistakes, error and deception are evoked by Lacan in a typically elusive phrase when he describes "the structuration of speech in search of truth" as "error taking flight in deception and recaptured by mistake."[11]

Truth and Fiction

Lacan does not use the term 'fiction' in the sense of 'a falsehood', but in the sense of a scientific construct.[12]

Thus Lacan's term 'fiction' corresponds to Freud's term Konvention, convention,[13] and has more in common with truth than falsehood.

Indeed, Lacan states that truth is structured like a fiction.[14]

Truth and the real

The opposition which Lacan draws between truth and the real dates back to his pre-war writings,[15] and is taken up at various points; "We are used to the real. The truth we repress."[16]

However, Lacan also points out that truth is similar to the real; it is impossible to articulate the whole truth, and "[p]recisely because of this impossibility, truth aspires to the real."[17]


definition

Sigmund Freud's notion of truth evolved from a factual conception into a relativistic method where the true and the false are defined both in relation to a conventional and bounded space (that of the cure) and the dynamic effects that "plausible" constructions might have on the psyche.

Truth as an objective no longer remains "the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis."[18]

It inclines towards the notion of reality testing that demands that the subject partially abandon their illusions.

Truth as an ideal is inseparable from psychoanalytic inquiry and is unattainable, except partially in the "nuclei" of truth present within individual and collective distortions.

The search for factors that cause psychic suffering can be confused with the search for truth inasmuch as they are both repressed, misrepresented, displaced, represented by their opposite, and the like.

Initially Freud imagined rediscovering the traumatic events in the histories of his patients themselves, but promptly noticing "that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect" (letter to Wilhelm Fleiss, 21 September 1897), he ended up privileging the psychical reality of the subject, wherein a dynamic verisimilitude was elaborated which would take on the value of truth.

This relativization of truth seems to coincide with a Pirandellian conception of it (Each in His Own Way).

In fact, truth as a value has not disappeared from the Freudian purview but it has become subtler.

Thus interpretation is not about the exhumation of truth but rather construction through the adoption of a coherent paradigm (Viderman, 1970), originating from the unperceived formulations of the subject's free associations or dreams.

Thus for Jacques Lacan, truth extricates itself from reality:

"In psychoanalytic anamnesis, it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come."[19]

Truth is not precisely being true to reality, rather it speaks and stutters through its symptomatic distortions.

The analyst has to engage with these "nuclei" of truth, then; Freud, for instance, defined them in relation to the sexual theories of children, which despite being untrue nonetheless each contain "a fragment of real truth."[20]

This is an adult, intellectual mode of investigation whose results, because they are limited to the possibilities of human understanding, would have been false in relation to a broader perspective, but which include nevertheless "inspired" partial but significant interpretations.

The quest for truth proceeds from a "truth fantasy" (Mijolla-Mellor, 1985), which relates to an image of lost harmony (transparency, luminosity) within the I, the others, and one's self.

Truth, in terms of the demand for truthfulness, is central to the fundamental rule that requires the abandonment of secrecy; however, it also guides the behavior of the analyst in their relationship with the patient, in their vision of the world, and in their research, requiring them to relinquish personal illusions for the construction of a coherent schema.

Challenging illusion and narcissistic comfort, truth, according to Freud, is a force in its own right:

"The hardest truths are heard and recognized at last, after the interests they have injured and the emotions they have roused have exhausted their fury."[21]

Piera Aulagnier gives truth a central place in relation to the identity of the subject.

It is the object of a "battle never definitively won nor lost to which periodically the I must surrender in order to modify and defend its positions, failing which it would be unable to turn towards or invest in its own identificatory space."[22]

The notion of truth in psychoanalysis is tied to the history the subject, in the same way as it is to humanity, because it is not simply a case of a balance between understanding and the thing, but of a narrative that is reconstructed using the residues left behind by legend.

See Also

References

  1. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.144
  2. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.217
  3. Template:Sl7 p.122
  4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.24
  5. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.172
  6. Template:Sl p.228
  7. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.79
  8. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.874
  9. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.153-4
  10. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.139-40; Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 19566-57. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.107-8)
  11. Template:Sl p. 273
  12. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.12
  13. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.163
  14. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. 306; Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 808
  15. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.75
  16. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.169
  17. Lacan, 1973a: 83
  18. 1914g, pp. 147, 150
  19. 1956, p. 48
  20. 1908c, p. 215
  21. 1910d, p. 215
  22. 1984, p. 147
  1. Freud, Sigmund. (1908c). On the sexual theories of children. SE, 9: 205-226.
  2. ——. 1910d). The future prospects of psycho-analytic therapy. SE, 11: 139-151.
  3. ——. (1950a [1887-1902]). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173-280.
  4. Lacan, Jacques. (1989). Ecrits: A Selection. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.) 5th ed. London: Tavistock/Routledge.

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